NEW YORK – The percentage of American elementary and middle schools that offer foreign language classes has dropped significantly in recent decades.

That reality was at the center of a recent speech that New York City charter school CEO Eva Moskowitz delivered to the American Enterprise Institute earlier this month. Moskowitz runs 32 charter schools that educate approximately 9,000 students each year, and many of them outperform their more affluent peers on state standardized tests.

But providing quality instruction while balancing important academic focus areas is a difficult task, she said, according to The Atlantic.

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“So something’s got to go,” Moskowitz told the AEI. “We picked – and you know this may be hocking to this audience – we picked foreign languages.

“People say ‘Don’t you believe in foreign languages?’ I love multilingualism. I speak French, but something had to go. We can’t do everything. And by the way, American’s don’t tend to do foreign languages very well.

“I think if I were doing schools in Europe I might feel differently. But my son took three years of French and he could barely say, ‘How are you?’ … I really believe whatever we do we should do it exceptionally well and I wasn’t sure that I could find foreign language instructors that were really good and could do it at a very very high level,” she said.

The Atlantic points to a 2009 study by the Center for Applied Linguistics that shows the percentage of public elementary schools that teacher foreign languages has dropped from 24 percent in 1997 to 15 percent in 2008, while private elementary schools decreased far less, from 53 percent in 1997 to 51 percent in 2008.

It was the same story in middle schools, where public schools that offered foreign languages slid from 75 percent 1997 to 58 percent in 2008. High schools remained relatively steady, going up from 90 percent to 91 percent during the same time frame, according to the CAL report.

“Survey results revealed issues of unequal access to foreign language instruction. Schools in rural areas and schools whose students were of lower socioeconomic status were less likely to offer foreign language classes,” according to the report, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

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“In addition, the percentage of private elementary schools offering foreign language instruction was more than three times that of public elementary schools.”

Forbes columnists David Skorton and Glenn Altschuler pointed out in 2012 that the decrease in foreign language classes isn’t limited to elementary and middle schools, and explained why Americans should care about the downward trend.

“In 2009-10, only 50.7 percent of higher education institutions required a foreign language study for a baccalaureate, down from 67.5 percent in 1994-95,” they wrote. “And many colleges and universities, including Cornell, have reduced or eliminated instructional offerings in ‘less popular’ languages.

“We should care – a lot – about our foreign language deficit. We need diplomats, intelligence and foreign policy experts, politicians, military leaders, business leaders, scientists, physicians, entrepreneurs, managers, technicians, historians, artists and writers who are proficient in languages other than English,” Skorton and Altschuler said.

“And we need them to read and speak less commonly taught languages … that are essential to our strategic and economic interests, such as Farsi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Burmese and Indonesian.”

In other words, “the message is simple: in 1957, after the Russians launched Sputnik, Congress passed and President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, which provided federal support for foreign language instruction as well as science education,” they wrote.

“We may not be quite as frightened as we were during the height of the Cold War, but we must be just as resolute in designing a comprehensive approach to foreign language acquisition that will prepare the next generation of Americans for success in a highly competitive, tightly interconnected world.”